Prospecting is a highly emotional experience for both the sales person and the individual being prospected.  I believe if you can take the emotion out of it, it would change things completely, but that is truly overstating the obvious.

One way for sellers to deal with and balance the emotion is to do a lot more up front preparation in targeting would be prospects and preparing for the discussion, responses and potential direction the initial conversation may take.  Doing this in advance say for the week or next two weeks to come, allows for better use of prospecting time.  Creating lists of people to be approached based on predetermined criteria and attributes should allow for more focused activity.  The knowledge going in should reduce the anxiety levels, and allow for a more quality interaction based with some quantified factors based on previous customers and even loses to help avoid certain situations.  But it all should lead to a list of people worth calling and trying to engage with and create a viable prospect.

Still, with all the preparation and the relative comfort that should come from a well prepared list, many sales people still question and second guess their list.  At the most crucial time, when they should be moving things forward, they instead sit and have a psychic, telepathic exchange with their list, and don’t call people who were vetted in advance for some emotional reason. 

You know, people whose last names start with J, who work in odd numbered buildings on even floors never take appointments on Monday.  People living west of the Mississippi, who drive imported cars, have two kids, never take appointments on Tuesdays.  They divine all this just by looking at a piece of paper with a name on it that in fact has passed the mustered when the list was prepared last Thursday.

They say on Wall Street “don’t fight the tape” (when was the last time you saw tape?), so in sales the battle cry should be “don’t fight your list!”  This of course assumes that the list is developed using a logical process based on agreed on and validated criteria for minimally qualified would be prospects.  What’s even harder for some sales people is when the list is developed by someone else, say marketing.  But once you have put in the hard work in advance, and have created levels of qualification, you should get to work on converting them. (See elsewhere in this blog for qualification discussion, as well as Sales Bloggers Union, specifically Quantifying is Qualifying 2.0) 

If for some reason conversion ratios change, capture the factors, introduce them into the process, make the necessary adjustments, and then get back on you horse, or phone.  But time spent fighting your list, is time spent fighting results.  Once they are on your list based on solid reasons, reach out to them and engage, don’t second guess.

What’s in Your Pipeline?
Tibor Shanto